In a development that has left geopolitical analysts reach for their smelling salts and their thesauruses, the United States and Iran have reportedly agreed to stand down following a series of tit-for-tat strikes that resembled nothing so much as a pair of senile badgers slapping each other with wet fish. The Whitehall mandarins, those pallid custodians of British statecraft, have immediately warned that this peace is about as fragile as a Fabergé egg balanced on a unicycle during an earthquake.
Let us pause to savour the sheer, magnificent absurdity of this moment. For weeks, we have been treated to the spectacle of two nations engaging in what can only be described as a diplomatic Mexican standoff in a hall of mirrors. President Donald Trump, a man whose grip on reality is roughly equivalent to a toddler's grip on a helium balloon, has been posturing like a pear-shaped peacock with a megaphone. Meanwhile, the mullahs in Tehran, those venerable septuagenarians who look like they've been preserved in formaldehyde since the 1979 revolution, have been issuing threats with all the menace of a grandfather shaking his fist at a cloud.
The strikes themselves were a masterpiece of futility. The Americans, with their multi-trillion-dollar arsenal, managed to achieve exactly the same strategic outcome as a man throwing a rock at a wasp nest: brief, satisfying noise, followed by a protracted period of stinging humiliation. The Iranians retaliated by launching missiles that appeared to be aimed with the precision of a drunk man trying to score a dart on a moving bus. Miraculously, no one was killed, unless you count the dying embers of common sense in the Pentagon war room.
And so, with the grace of two boxers clinching after accidentally catching each other in the groin, both sides have agreed to retreat to their respective corners. The fragile peace, as Whitehall so cautiously describes it, hangs by a thread made of diplomatic boilerplate and lukewarm tea. The real question is: what have we learned from this latest instalment of the Great Game played by Very Silly Men?
Absolutely nothing. We have learned nothing. We will continue to pretend that the Islamic Republic is a rational actor, even as its supreme leader uses terms like 'divine vengeance' with the casual air of a man ordering a pizza. We will persist in the fantasy that the United States has a coherent foreign policy, rather than a series of spasmodic twitches dictated by electoral calculus and the whim of a reality television star.
But let us not be churlish. Let us raise a glass of the finest airport gin to the brave men and women who orchestrated this diplomatic masterpiece. To the negotiators who, through sheer force of boredom, managed to convince both sides that continuing this pointless exercise would be terribly bad for business. To the journalists who, in between breathless tweets and live updates, managed to convey the terrifying banality of modern warfare. And to the generals who, for one shining moment, remembered that war is merely a continuation of politics by other means, and politics is merely a continuation of idiocy by other means.
As we stagger into this new dawn of tentative peace, let us take a moment to appreciate the sheer, breathtaking absurdity of it all. Two nations with the combined firepower to incinerate the planet several times over have decided to call it quits because, frankly, they couldn't be bothered to continue. It is a victory for inertia, for apathy, for the quiet power of everyone just losing interest.
In the immortal words of a hungover Beatle: 'And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.' Or perhaps, in this case, the peace you keep is equal to the gin you drink. Cheers.
